China could ‘go it alone’, Australian conference hears

Beijing could ban its students from going abroad as the “drive for ideological control” sidelines Western universities from “Xi Jinping’s China dream”, an Australian conference has heard.

Canadian strategist Alex Usher said a scenario in which China “turns off the tap of international students” – unthinkable a couple of years back – was now a distinct possibility that many Western countries had failed to appreciate.

“[It] has gotten to the point where it’s conceivable that China just says, ‘We don’t need the West any more,’” Mr Usher told the Australian Financial Review Higher Education Summit. Beijing could decide that the “ideological cost” of international education was just too high, although there were signs that it also objected to the financial cost.

“Nobody knows what would happen if you suddenly had a catastrophic loss of Chinese students,” Mr Usher told the summit. In North America, “a lot of science and engineering labs…would basically shut down. That has an impact not just on universities and university finances, but on the whole innovation flow.”

He said Australia had already faced China tensions “as much as anyone other than the US. It’s really starting to close borders as far as scientific cooperation is concerned. Higher education institutions are increasingly…in the sights of national security.”

A former director of Canada’s Educational Policy Institute, Mr Usher now heads the Higher Education Strategy Associates consultancy in Toronto. He said Covid-19, Joe Biden’s election as US president and the “culture wars” were the other major recent developments impacting higher education globally.

“The culture wars…are making some types of governments much more sceptical about universities at exactly the time universities need more government money,” he said. This had happened in the US, where some states were “interfering” in the teaching of history, and was behind Australia’s fee changes to make the humanities “less financially rewarding”.

“It’s the kind of thing you see in Hungary and Poland and much of the ex-Soviet Union. Universities like to think of themselves as being neutral bodies [that] can work with governments of any sort”, and being perceived as political combatants was “a real challenge. It’s not a place that universities have been, in the West anyway, since World War Two.”

Mr Usher said new pedagogies and credentials were among the “most interesting” things to come out of the pandemic, with a “strong minority” of students happy to persist with online education while new credentials promised “real renewal in lifelong learning. The problem is, doing that stuff well requires economies of scale.”

He said the sale of the edX online learning platform was perhaps the “biggest story” of 2021. “MIT and Harvard, which between them have $70 billion (£50.4 billion) in endowments, decided they didn’t have enough money to keep up with the private sector in terms of having a good user experience in higher education. If that’s true, I don’t know what chance the rest of us have.”

Mr Usher said universities had become “more attuned to political needs” as they confronted the scarcity of funding. While many had embraced sustainable development goals to articulate their missions, they described these “ostensibly global” aspirations in primarily local terms. “They use a global imagery but it’s fiercely local, because they’re terrified of what’s going to happen if they are seen to be offside with local communities.”

Mr Usher said funding would remain an overriding concern for universities around the world. “[Those in] countries that that have been dependent on government rather than fees have done very well through Covid so far. But in the medium to longer term, they’re going to do the worst because they don’t have the ability to get new funds.

“The appetite for more domestic fees is low. Left and populist governments alike [are] unlikely to concur with domestic tuition increases. What that means is you will see people cranking up competition for what I call free market students – students who pay a market rate. The fight for those students is going to be much more intense than it used to be, and that includes from the US.”

Australian universities might be unrealistic if they imagine they can transition to “a new business model that’s less dependent on offshore students,” he warned. “I’m not sure anybody else thinks that’s possible.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com